Blades of Fire is an Action game which may or may not be an RPG, but it has a sick weapon crafting system

One of the pitfalls of being a genre site is sometimes having to make a call on whether or not a game falls within our scope. We do make exceptions, and we stretch what games we should be covering - we review Visual Novels on occasion, of course - but sometimes we come across games like Blades of Fire, which aren't quite an RPG but offer something that would appeal to fans of the genre.

Blades of Fire is the most recent project from MercurySteam, and there are a number of mechanics that make it quite unlike anything else on the market. Combat, for one, focuses on targeting different sections of an enemy's body; with the face buttons corresponding to the cardinal directions for an attack. Weapons have 1 or sometimes combinations of 3 attributes, depending on if you can use them to stab, to slash or to strike. When locked onto an enemy, the color of their outline will even denote how effective your currently equipped weapon - and, crucially, how you're choosing to utilize it - will be, even down to the granularity of what armor they have equipped, and on which part of their body.

As an example; if you're using a broadsword, chances are that an enemy wearing a helmet means you'll want to avoid attacking their head, even if normally that's the best area to strike - yet if you have a hammer, suddenly that helmet doesn't act as much of a deterrent at all. While normally you'll be swinging a broadsword around, you can actually switch to using it to poke at enemies - albeit at a reduced efficiency. Naturally, the effectiveness of each weapon for any of the attacking styles they can utilize doesn't just rely on the blueprint and any adjustments you made when crafting it, but also what materials you opted to include when forging.

It's a fascinating system, and the method in which players unlock those blueprints is equally novel. Your main character's companion isn't any good at fighting, but he can draw up notes from enemies you've defeated - after enough encounters with enemies with the same weapons, he'll have a perfectly usable blueprint for the forge. Statues scattered throughout the game world depict soldiers with specific weapons, and if you've managed to forge the weapon they're holding you can return to them to receive a reward.

Crucially, while each zone of the game seems rather self-contained, it's made very clear that you're free to return to previous areas at your leisure - and not least of all, those same statues are your clue that there's plenty of reason to backtrack. It's hard to say exactly what sort of RPG progression that Blades of Fire holds, beyond upgrades to your health and stamina, but between unlocking new materials to work with for weapons, gathering resources for said materials, and more it's not hard to see how RPG fans might be interested in what the game is offering.

I don't know, truthfully, if we'll fully cover Blades of Fire - but I can't deny that I'm interested in seeing more. Blades of Fire launches for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC (exclusively on Epic) on May 22.